An Ordinary Female Life: On Rachel Cusk’s Parade
Rachel Cusk | Parade | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | June 2024 | 201 Pages
My first goal for this essay was to pinpoint exactly where Rachel Cusk’s interest in visual art began. I am not sure why the chronology seemed so important—perhaps because of the persistent delusion that beginnings are in some way definitional, and that to uncover the starting point of a story is also to be shown its ending and its purpose. The jacket copy for her 2009 travel memoir, The Last Supper, informed me it was about a summer in Italy spent “searching for art and its meanings,” exploring “the desire to travel and to escape, of art and its inspirations, of beauty and ugliness.” (I love jacket copy for its banalities. The back of Cusk’s previous novel, Second Place, limpidly tells us that it “reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift—and to destroy.” The jacket copy for her latest novel, Parade, tells us the book “expands the notion of what fiction can be and do.”) The Last Supper is a curious object, her second nonfiction book after her controversial motherhood memoir, A Life’s Work, and in some ways a prequel to Aftermath, the equally controversial divorce that followed.
A mixed review of The Last Supper in The New York Times ends with writing advice tinged by minor-league chauvinism: “I hope that next time she visits Italy she leaves her domestic baggage at home and concentrates on looking at the art.” At first I found this not just a stupid remark but a mysterious one. Her husband is hardly present—barely a character at all, mentioned as a distinct entity only a handful of times and primarily represented with the deceptive simplicity of a “we.” Her two daughters have more sway but mostly as markers of responsibility, understood only by their needs but curiously lacking in individual personality. You get the sense that Cusk has, in fact, attempted to minimize her “domestic baggage.” She is not interested in the particular plots and characters that emerge from family life, the plots we find in Tolstoy’s similarly happy or singularly unhappy families.
But the repressed always returns. Reading The Last Supper, I found some truth in the reviewer’s complaint. The relative absence of her family seems symptomatic of some stranger, deeper absence in her experience of domesticity. It is this absence that ultimately drives her to uproot her life. She cannot sleep—the noise from the road keeps her up. This noise gradually transforms, becoming:
unearthly groans and shrieks … that seemed to belong neither to the world nor to my dreams but somewhere in between. They might have been men’s voices or women’s, it was hard to tell. The noise they made came from a region that outlay human identity. Their long, inchoate monologues, vocalized yet senseless, seemed to name something that afterwards could not be specified.
But then the sun comes up, and with it the concerns of domestic life; this strange formlessness is replaced by the “steady and industrious” sound of traffic.
We can’t fully make sense of these opposing forces, and we suspect Cusk cannot either. This is why she turns to the classic English tradition of fleeing for the continent with the hopes of resolving it, and yet she is conscious that it is not a form that came to her organically. She has learned it from novels, where a European sojourn functions as a “cure for everything.” She hopes her Italian sabbatical will work on her as they did on Henry James heroines. She seeks a cure for the “hunger that seemed to gnaw at the very ligaments of my soul, whose cause was as hidden from me as were the means of satisfaction.” This is of course a fundamentally bourgeois tendency—to think of extracurricular cultural consumption as not just a form of personal cultivation but also as a cure for the domestic malaise she never quite declares.
Not that it needs to be declared. Domesticity in The Last Supper is a form that is at once carefully cultivated and insufficient, unable to grasp the “vocalized yet senseless” experience that lacks or resists form so absolutely that—as Cusk notes in her attempt at description—it cannot be accurately gendered or even understood as human. Her conflicted relationship to domestic life in this book is a clear extension of A Life’s Work, where she finds her sense of self radically divided by her experience of motherhood. Her motherly persona is one she “cannot seem to support without injury to what I have to know as my self.” “No matter how much I try to retain my self, my shape, within the confines of this trial, it is like trying to resist the sleep an anaesthetic forces upon a patient.” Perhaps this is why the book was so negatively received on release, at least by Cusk’s account. “I was only being honest” was the quote pulled for the headline of her 2008 self-defense.
Domesticity is an inorganic form, one that she receives rather than creates and that subsequently never quite fits. But at the same time, this does not make domesticity’s form any less real or substantial. It is like an ill-fitting garment we nevertheless continue to wear out of habit or necessity. “The harness of motherhood chafes my skin,” she tells us in A Life’s Work, “and yet occasionally I find a predictable integrity in it too, a freedom of a different sort: from complexity and choice and from the reams of unscripted time upon which I used to write my days, bearing the burden of their authorship.” The Last Supper sublimates these internal splits into its structure, an ekphrastic exercise in renegotiating the domestic form. In a short story Cusk published in 2003, the new father who narrates the story tells us, “It was right after he was born that I started looking at paintings.”
So Cusk looks at paintings. She seeks out the work of Renaissance artists, reading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists in preparation. What she finds in the paintings surprises her. If Piero della Francesca is notable for his complete lack of vanity, his strange mathematical theories of perception, she is shocked that his paintings are in complete accordance with his life; his subjects are “full of solitude and separation,” “terrible knowledge.” She notes the “sweetness of [Raphael’s] disposition,” which she finds in his paintings with “their devotional secularism, their innocent-seeming love.” Their work is the pure product of their selves—not of simple experience or its conscious transformation.
The way Cusk describes the artist’s work and life—as all of a whole—mirrors how the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty thinks about the two in his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt.” In Merleau-Ponty’s telling Cézanne is brilliant, a genius, a visionary—but at no point is this genius something that is cultivated, earned, or created. A painting is an entirely individual product of the senses, of the peculiarity of sight that emerges from the peculiarity of consciousness. Cézanne himself once said of his paintings of Mont Saint-Victoire that he was painting not the mountain itself but his perception of the mountain; it is this trait that Merleau-Ponty sets out to investigate. “Although it is certain that a man’s life does not explain his work,” he writes, “it is equally certain that the two are connected. The truth is that this work to be done called for this life.” A heroic kind of predestination, where the artistic vision is something “free from external causes” but not “free in respect to itself,” where form exists at the very moment of perception and is entirely particular to the perceiver. A silvery and strange kind of fate, its unity in stark opposition to Cusk’s divisions.
In her last days in Italy, Cusk looks at a honeymooning couple, lying “side by side on their loungers, glancing around self-consciously, estranged somehow, in spite of their common aesthetic purpose.” The domestic form becomes visible here, buzzing with contradiction, and in the process loosens itself from the world it shapes. “They grow molten, indistinct. Only sound is left … I close my eyes and the question is there. What am I doing here? It is as though I have carried a picture in my mind that has suddenly been atomized, has separated into a million particles. In its place there is the world, atonal, indiscriminate, random.” And then she thinks: “I need Raphael to paint them for me. I need an artist, to refine crude life into something I can understand.”
This did not happen. Instead, this atomization revealed itself to be a new reality. Three years later Cusk would publish Aftermath, her account of the complete breakdown of her domestic form. Looking through windows at families, framed like paintings, she thinks: “We’re not part of that story anymore, my children and I. We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom. The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.” Like the harness of motherhood, domestic life is another imposed form—one Cusk is now both exiled and liberated from in equal measure.
Cusk found both the experience she describes in Aftermath and its reception wholly traumatic. Reviews of the book collapsed the space between herself and the book she made, cementing her reputation as a cold-hearted bitch: as Emma Gilbey-Keller wrote in the New York Times, “Cusk’s biggest problem is her main character. Her self-absorption is still acute. The way she analyzes her every mood does not make her likable.” Later, she would describe the intervening years between Aftermath and Outline as being a kind of “creative death,” one that made fiction feel “fake and embarrassing.” What she seems to have found most fake and embarrassing at the time was the idea of character itself, telling interviewers: “I don't really believe in character. I believe in moments of truth. Even if it's just literally a momentary emergence like someone getting out of the sea and standing on the rock for a minute … they can see where they are, they can see themselves, and they can see what's around them, and they can say what it is.”
The radical decentralization of the trilogy is, in its way, a childlike defense mechanism in response to her memoirs: if you don’t like me, I will disappear. But it is also her attempt to capture this kind of truth, which only emerges from being in the world with “its fragmentation, its freedom.” What we also find in this explanation is the beginning of the problem that characterizes her last two novels. The person who emerges from the sea (a sort of lovely, pastoral fantasy) finds truth not in saying what it is, but in the moment of seeing: “they can see where they are, they can see themselves.” Like Merleau-Ponty’s Cézanne, the truth of the world is the truth of perception. Language does not enter into it, and arrives at the scene only after the fact.
This gap is a problem the abolition of character could not solve. In her The Art of Fiction interview for The Paris Review, she said as much:
With age, language betrays you. Language shows how old you are. It shows so many things about your identity in the first place, your social class. But as you get older—you see it happen, you see writers suddenly become slightly embarrassing or lose touch with the story of life. They cease to understand it properly. … Whereas the visual world, it doesn’t legislate for lived life in the way that language does. It’s not the currency of lived life. An image doesn’t have to be recognizable in the way a sentence does. To tell a story is to reconstruct the conditions of reality in order to manipulate or change them. An image can be post-reality—it can start from a position in which reality is already assumed.
Language doesn’t belong to her, it belongs to the world. It is our first and most powerful form of mediation. She never chose it as a tool; it was simply given to her, as it is given to all of us. This notion parallels Cusk’s understanding of domesticity and all its attendant forms — gender, marriage, motherhood. “I feel I lived as a woman,” she says. “I lived through womanhood in the most basic, and indeed arduous, ways. And now, I don’t feel gendered. And I’m interested in knowing what is after gender.” When asked her how she plans to do it, she is unsure. All she can offer is: “Definitely where I’m heading to is a kind of writing that I want to be much more akin to visual art … I’d like to make something where the imprint of identity is much less palpable. I am sort of bashing my head trying to work out how to do it.” We understand, through the haze of her so extremely un-Cusk-like uncertainty, exactly why she turns to both gender and visuality in the two novels she’s written since. She is looking for a way out.
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Both Parade, Cusk’s newest novel, and Second Place have these twinned themes at heart. In Second Place, M—the female narrator, neurotic, prone to exclamation points, a writer of “minor” books—invites L—a prominent, aging, and increasingly impotent male painter—to come stay with her and her family in an English marshland. What ensues is a strange drama, staged by Cusk to illuminate a philosophical problem that at first seems like a psychological one. M’s attachment to L starts before the novel begins, and originates with his work. “A young mother on the brink of rebellion”, she wanders into an exhibit of his work. She is shocked to find that his paintings—with their “aura of absolute freedom … a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke”—have some kind of symmetrical relationship to the “impossible yearnings” that seem to be driving her to upend her own life. Looking at one of his self-portraits, she is stunned by their impossible mixture of the “coldness of the act of perception … a cosmic coldness and loneliness” and the tenderness she finds in his detailing, the rendering of “plain features unanimated by recognition” which is “the most human and loving thing in the world.”
Here, L lays M’s contradictions of perception for bare. His freedom—a state of pure subjectivity, here enhanced by the fact L is painting himself—gives way to an objectivity that breaks her understanding of the world as she knows it: “I felt myself falling out of the frame I had lived in for years, the frame of human implication in a particular set of circumstances. From that moment, I ceased to be immersed in the story of my own life and became distinct from it.” And yet this revelation is more like a rediscovery; the paintings “found them, somewhere inside me.” Like Cusk in The Last Supper, the paintings she sees speak to some fundamental uneasiness that already exists and cannot be fully assimilated into preexisting structures. And like Cusk, M longs for an artist—in this case, L—to come and “refine crude life into something I can understand.” She tells us that L “coming to where I was and looking at it through his own eyes … would have taken that consummation [of my solitary self] to a point of finality and given me—or so I believed—a version of the freedom I had wanted my whole life.” A freedom that she thinks, from the first instant she sees his work, is the absolute product of maleness.
Second Place—as Cusk’s afterword at the end of the book states—“owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D. H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico. My version—in which the Lawrence figure is a painter, not a writer—is intended as a tribute to her spirit.” The basic structure of the book, including many of the names—its epistolary address to someone called Jeffers, M’s ambiguously racialized husband Tony, L’s sexy young companion Brett—accord almost exactly with Luhan’s memoir. This also includes the difficult relationship between the male artist (Lawrence/L) and his female patron (Mabel/M). Cusk has always described Lawrence as one of her first and most important influences, saying in her Paris Review interview that “I think a lot of women writers have similarly found their voice as a result of reading Lawrence, and I think it was because he was a working-class man. So hearing a voice that is not a privileged male voice makes you realize that there is another voice in you.” Cusk restages Luhan’s memoir of Lawrence to interrogate the contradiction at the heart of this dynamic. If men’s freedom—as opposed to the norms of femininity and motherhood that define and divide women’s consciousness—is what grants them not just the capacity for the pure vision Merleau-Ponty championed but also the material conditions to turn that vision into art, then what does it mean for the women seduced and subsequently liberated by the work these men have made?
When L finally does come to stay, M increasingly longs for L’s attention the more he scorns and humiliates her. She believes it will suddenly make her own obscured vision of reality clear. “I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator, and I saw that I had summoned L across the continents intuitively believing that he could perform that transformative function for me, could release me into creative action,” she writes. “Well, he had obeyed, and apparently nothing significant had come of it.” Part of the reason for this, Cusk suggests, is that M’s desire for L’s attention is not purely aesthetic. From the start she is troubled by the sense that L “did not consider me to be truly a woman,” and sees this as a confirmation of her own feelings about her femininity; she admits early on that she “never felt all that womanly in the first place.”
This is why she’s thrilled when he finally agrees to paint her, requesting she wear “something that fits.” The suggestion indicates that L’s vision will grant her not just freedom but also femininity—an impossible dream on the terms Cusk has dictated. The only item of clothing that fits the bill is her wedding dress, and when she makes her way to L’s cottage—the titular “second place”—she finds L and Brett at work painting a mural of the Garden of Eden with her as Eve. She overhears them conspiring: “Let’s give her a moustache, the castrating bitch!” “And let’s give her a nice fat little belly, a barren belly like a middle-aged lady’s!” It is a sordid and cruel fantasy, acknowledging her femininity but in the form of a caricature that lacks any of the feeble consolations female experience supposedly grants. She is without beauty and beyond motherhood—not just barren, but castrating. Her desire to be painted by L has been fulfilled, but it turns out to be like all our other desires. To fulfill it is also to destroy it.
But the joke is on L. Shortly after this he has a stroke and nearly dies, becoming physically debilitated and entirely dependent on M and her family for care. He begins to paint in a new style soon after, one borne out of the “dissonance between consciousness and physical being.” M tells us these paintings were a career renaissance for him, and he leaves the second place shortly after. He leaves behind only a painting of M and her daughter emerging after swimming at night in the phosphorescent marsh, one she happened to catch him working on. When she does, she feels as if she “witnessed something in the way of a sacrament, the sort of sacrament that only occurs in nature, when an organism … silently and unobserved confirms its own being.” Looking at the painting after L leaves, she sees two half-forms “composed of light” and “beseeching one another, or striving to unify, and in their striving the oneness miraculously occurs.” In this way, L does show her a kind of truth, or at least a path forward—one where the unity of disparate forms is the ultimate artistic aim.
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If Second Place marks Cusk’s return to narrative in the form of a kind of philosophical fable, Parade is more like the Outline trilogy in its fragmentation. The book is comprised of four loosely linked novellas, each following a different artist designated by the letter “G.” The first G is a painter known for his inverted paintings based on Georg Baselitz; the second is a woman painter who appears to be based on a mixture of Cusk herself and subject of a 2019 Cusk profile Cecily Brown; the third is Louise Bourgeois, and the fourth is the filmmaker Eric Rohmer. The first and the third stories are loosely linked by witnessing a suicide in the Bourgeois exhibit. Besides that, the only connective tissue here is Cusk’s voice—as icy here as it’s ever been. It is a puzzling book, one that requires a great deal of forbearance on the part of the reader.
The first section of Parade is primarily narrated by the first G’s wife, and is for my money the most interesting section of the book. For her husband, the paintings are a solution to a formal problem of representation, allowing the restoration of “the principal of wholeness, so that the world was once more intact but upside down and thus free of the constraint of reality. But for her, the experience of seeing them is like being hit; they “inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition.” “The feeling of everything seeming right but being fundamentally wrong was one she powerfully recognised,” Cusk writes. “It was her condition, the condition of her sex. The paintings made her unhappy, or rather they led her to acknowledge the existence of an unhappiness that seemed to have always been inside her.” The connection she feels with the work is similar to M’s relationship to L’s work, but here that moment of revelation explicitly emerges from her experience of gender. Like M, we are told that G’s wife “yearned for the description of herself that he refused to offer.” Like M, when her husband actually agrees to paint her she finds herself disturbed by and disappointed in the result even as it also discloses a kind of reality. Not only does he make her “ugly,” but he also by painting her shows her “the spectacle of her own unrealized life” and how he has used her body as “a sort of shield that he holds in front of himself against the attack by time.” He has made her alive to how the experience of femininity has shaped her, but—like L’s depiction of M—he traps her there. He frees himself from reality’s constraints only to imprison her in them.
Cusk essentially reiterates the concerns at the heart of Second Place in this first section, down to the similarities between the description of the effect L’s paintings have on M and the effect G’s paintings have on his wife. But suddenly she veers off from this, introducing us to two other Gs: the 19th-century woman painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the black artist Norman Lewis. If in her husband’s work she finds truth but not freedom, these painters show her a new way of relating to her own marginality. In Modersohn-Becker she sees a woman “trying to show herself from the outside, while she experiences the dawning knowledge of her situation and its consequences. She doesn’t entirely know quite what it is she has chosen: she is being led by instinct” which is “the pre-eminent freedom attributed to male artists.” And her instinct is to show us how her artistic vision is shaped and warped by femininity, with G’s wife noting that she “often painted in dramatic close-up, for instance the mouth of a baby suckling a breast. … She was making a point not just about lack of physical workspace and the inundation of that space by others, but about what a woman sees; not an artist, but a woman in the reality of her womanhood.”
G’s wife finds something similar in Lewis’s work, connecting his art to his failure to find creative equality. She looks at his painting of a cathedral—a grand monument he depicts abstractly on a small scale as a network of lines glowing red like embers—and sees it as a document of this marginalization and failure. “He chose to represent it so as to not add more to the balance sheet of lost things: he was placing it on the scales of justice, this account of his refusal to be divided from himself. By painting the obscurity he is trying not to become angry with it,” she says. “Instead he is trying to love it, the darkness in which he moves, the light that sometimes pierces it and that only his eyes can see.” Both Lewis and Modersohn-Becker find their genius in the same way Merleau-Ponty’s Cézanne did—by capturing the instant where consciousness meets the world in an act of perception that is so spontaneous it seems to move beyond identity; this hews close to Cusk’s vague explanation of what she means by “moments of truth.” But at the same time the artist’s consciousness, their vision, exists in a world that is not pure. Identity shapes us in ways that are at once predetermined and unknown, our first formal experience. It teaches us both the power of form and shows us its limits. And without its “darkness,” its capacity to conceal and transform, there is no giving way to the “light that sometimes pierces it and that only his eyes can see.” This is at once a defeat and a revelation for a writer longing to be liberated from the “imprint of identity.” For the artists she describes, freedom is found not in escaping the conditions of their lives but in capturing them.
Strangely, Parade has been as controversial a book as any of Cusk’s memoirs; it’s been panned by both The New York Times and New York Magazine for its obliquity, pretentiousness, and, perhaps most damningly, gender essentialism. There is some truth in all these critiques. The experience of reading Parade frequently baffled me, made me want to beat my head against the wall. Her crispness is close to brittleness, her ambivalence so extreme it verges on absolute opacity. And I must admit a certain kind of political anxiety prickled the back of my neck as I read, again and again, phrases like “the truth of her female caste” or “the mystery and tragedy of her own sex.” It made me wonder if Cusk was terminally British in the J.K. Rowling sense. This is why Andrea Long Chu accuses her of writing in an “inscrutable private language that has allowed her flatly essentialist views about gender to pass for the feminist avant-garde.” Has Cusk herself fallen into the very trap she diagnosed earlier, of writers who “suddenly become slightly embarrassing or lose touch with the story of life”?
To read Cusk in this way is to misunderstand her project. Long Chu assumes Cusk’s relationship to the regressive ideas of gender these novels engage with is one where they are taken for granted as a kind of absolute, biological truth. As evidence, she quotes Cusk as saying she’s too old to think of gender as “open to examination,” but the full quotation reads: “[Motherhood] still a thing imposed on you and within you. And I guess it could be said that gender is also that. I suppose my thinking never went in that direction. All I think now, I’m 52, is that the whole idea of gender being open to examination is just too late for me. It definitely would have changed me to know when I was younger that gender was, not optional, but that it could be broken.” In this sense, it is true that Cusk has lost touch. She knows that her ideas about gender and her interest in examining the formal limitations it imposes are becoming relics, just as her experience of gender is starting to become as unrecognizable to us as her life was to her mother.
When asked about the relationship between marginality and abstraction in Parade, Cusk said: “If you're living an ordinary female life, living in marriage structures and parent structures, and either you decide to conceal the difficulty of that in order to continue to compete in the world, or you are radicalized by it. You say ‘no, everyone has to know how difficult this is so that the world can change’ and I think that that's a very, very, basic artistic decision for anyone.” What Cusk thinks of as an “ordinary female life” is of course inescapably tied to her own ideas of identity and what femininity is; for her, this idea of femininity—traditionally defined by domesticity, motherhood, and marriage—is still worth examining. Like the final G of Parade, she is interested in “the fragments that change leaves behind in its storming passage towards the future.” It is of course debatable how useful this examination is, but at the same time there is no getting around the fact that traditional ideas of femininity and domesticity shaped Cusk’s experience; the twin traumas of motherhood and divorce and the reception of her books about them stand as examples of this. This is also to say nothing of the many other people whose lives were shaped by these outdated categories. Andrea Long Chu is not exactly wrong when she says Cusk’s “genius exceeds the depth of her own experience”—but at the same time, is there anyone with experience deep enough to not be tarred by the same brush? To reveal the particularity of one’s experience is not necessarily to endorse the limitations that have produced it.
Parade is not Cusk’s best book. Even after writing about it, I feel uncertain I have understood it. I wonder if Cusk understands it, recalling her supreme uncertainty in The Art of Fiction interview: “When a painter paints a self-portrait people navigate the act of exposure better. Why is that? If I could just work it out…” “I’d like to make something where the imprint of identity is much less palpable. I am sort of bashing my head trying to work out how to do it.” What she is doing in Parade is trying to work it out, and on that count she does not succeed. But this doesn’t necessarily mean she has failed either. Instead, the impression you get is that she’s not yet finished. The final lines of the novel indicate as much: “We recognised the ugliness of change; we embraced it, the litter-filled world where truth now lay. This grey reality, this meeting of darkness and light across shards of broken glass, was our beginning.” No way out of this world but through—an ending that is also a start.